Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe — Be Here Now

Sam Wagstaff played many roles in his life - collector, mentor, patron, and advocate of photography as art. 

Though primarily remembered for his relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Philip Gefter's biography shows Sam Wagstaff was so much more.

Sam Wagstaff played many roles in his 66 years on planet Earth. During the course of his life he evolved from private school boy in Majorca, to a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War, to advertising executive, museum curator and beyond.

Born into New York high society (the Wagstaff family once owned the land that would become Central Park), he began life with unique advantages. However, much of Wagstaff's childhood was spent apart from a mother he loved. She worked behind the scenes to ensure Sam's place in the Social Register of the time while her son spent his formative years attending boarding school on another continent.

As with most young men of his class, Wagstaff served in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War. Upon his return, he went into a career in advertising. As a gay man he learned how to hide his true nature throughout the 1940s' and 50s'. After he became bored of the advertising world, Wagstaff did a surprise about face and returned to school at 36 to study art history.

During the 1960s' Wagstaff's life took a more unconventional turn. In keeping with the 'Be Here Now' spirit of the later part of that decade he took risks as a curator and began to change his personal style. The 1964 'Black, White, and Gray' exhibition Wagstaff organized at the Wadsworth Atheneum was the first exhibit of minimalist art in the United States. In 1969 he attended Woodstock with an artist friend - by this time Sam the patrician had long hair and enjoyed smoking pot. Then, in March of 1971 during a stint at the Detroit Institute of Art, he gave the go ahead for Michael Heizer's Dragged Mass Displacement. The piece involved a giant slab of granite being dragged back and forth across the museum's front lawn.

The granite failed to sink into the lawn because of the soil's high clay content. What it did succeed in doing was pissing off the museum's trustees, which led to Wagstaff's resignation. Upon his return to New York, unsure of the next step he would take in life, Wagstaff was looking for a boyfriend. According to friends, he was looking for, "someone to spoil."

That someone was Robert Mapplethorpe, a young artist living at the Chelsea Hotel with poet (later rock star) Patti Smith. Mapplethorpe had been creating homoerotic art pieces and collages. This, and his physical attractiveness was widely acknowledged. Robert's ease with his own body probably struck a cord with Wagstaff. Mapplethorpe was not yet known for his provocative photos - which earned him notoriety - much less the flower pictures that made him money.

Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe became close after their first meeting. Wagstaff nicknamed Mapplethorpe his, "shy pornographer." In later years he would refer to Mapplethorpe in correspondence as his 'Muffin' or 'Wumper.'

In Mapplethorpe, Wagstaff found his counterpoint. The younger man's sensuality, his art, and way of being were a serious draw for the older man. As Gefter writes, "With Robert, the intellectual and the artistic, the romantic and the sexual forces all came together almost as naturally as breathing — and all at once."

Shortly after meeting Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Wagstaff would have an 'Aha!' moment about photography after seeing The Flatiron by Edward Steichen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1973. Along with supporting Mapplethorpe financially and with help from his art world contacts, Wagstaff began his own photography collection that he would sell a decade later to the Getty Museum. His aesthetic for collecting sexy, intellectual photographs is described in some detail in Gefter's book.

Wagstaff's letters, excerpts of which appear in the book, shed light on his capacity for intimacy and desire to be closer to Mapplethorpe. From a letter Wagstaff mailed in 1974:

"I hope we can keep finding new ways to be closer. There must be lots of joys of being closer that we haven't found yet. I hope you're hopeful and not discouraged about us."

As Sam's reputation as a collector with a large body of knowledge about the medium grew, so too did Mapplethorpe's reputation as a provocative artist. By 1983, Sam had grown bored of collecting photos. From Gefter's biography:

"No more revealing example of this can be found than in (Wagstaff's) relationship with Robert, for him the personification of photographic art making and through whom Sam had gotten as close as he would ever become to being an artist himself. This relationship glued him to photography, yet Robert was less and less glued to Sam...

Sam sent Robert a card on which he taped the printed word "YIPPEE" in bold letters emblazoned across the top and wrote, "My Muffin is getting very, very fame-iss. Monkey hugs and lots of love, Sam."

The sale of Sam's photography collection to the Getty Museum opened a new chapter in his life as a collector — this time the prized object would be American Silverware. Sam would collect silverware until he died of AIDS on January 14, 1987.

Before Wagstaff died, he worked with Artforum's Editor-in-Chief Ingrid Sischy to run a 6-page feature on his cats. Ever mischievous, Wagstaff was intent on sending the art world a message before his death.

"He may have felt compelled to represent the plight of cats in photography as an underappreciated genre, yet he derived gleeful pleasure from taunting an art world that took itself so seriously with a subject thought to be so clichéd, in a publication they considered a kind of Bible. He wanted to show them they were wrong while getting something of the last laugh."

What struck me after finishing Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe was Sam Wagstaff's ability to continuously evolve as a person. From appreciating and collecting art, to being a behind-the-scenes champion of so many artists, his passion was evident in most everything he touched. Wagstaff's capacity for intimacy and mischievous nature also recur throughout this excellent biography. 

Above and beyond these traits, this reader was left with a sense of Sam Wagstaff's commitment to 'Being Here Now' and living in real time. The dumb, simply being there sensual pleasure of experience is something he cherished. I can't help but feel that he was onto something.

Black + White + Grey: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe

In the last couple weeks I've watched, and re-watched, James Crump's excellent documentary on photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and his lover and patron, the wealthy New York photography (and later silverware) collector Sam Wagstaff. It's called Black + White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff + Robert Mapplethorpe. You can visit the documentary's website here. You'll find information about the film and an enticing trailer to boot.

Robert Mapplethorpe was one of many provocative artists of his day (1970s' through 1980s') Although Mapplethorpe shot celebrity portraits and flower studies, he's probably remembered most for his shocking sex pictures. It's these photos that caused museum censorship and attempted sanctions on freedom of expression from the United States Senate. These efforts were led by right-wing Senator Jesse Helms. At issue was Mapplethorpe's 'Perfect Moment' exhibit, which was shown in several states after his death from AIDS-related complications on March 9, 1989, on the eleventh floor of Deaconess Hospital in Boston.

Watching Crump's documentary and reading biographer Patricia Morrisroe's excellent Mapplethorpe: A Biography, it became apparent to me that Sam Wagstaff was the power behind the throne of Mapplethorpe's rise to prominence in the international art scene. He is now remembered as a relatively minor figure, though chances are Mapplethorpe's career likely wouldn't have amounted to spit in a bucket without Wagstaff's influence.

He connected Mapplethorpe with several art dealers and gallery owners, and bought Mapplethorpe an apartment. Mapplethorpe had previously been living in squalor at the Chelsea Hotel with Patti Smith.

Sam Wagstaff was born to a wealthy New York family on Nov. 4, 1921. After attending upper-class prep schools, Wagstaff served in the United States Navy during the Second World War. After leaving the Navy, he entered the advertising industry in NYC. However, unsatisfied by the advertising world, which he considered phony and shallow, Wagstaff made a mid-life career change and returned to school to study the arts.

After learning his new vocation, Wagstaff had a string of museum curatorships across the country. He eventually returned to New York, and in the early 1970s, when Wagstaff was in his mid-fifties, and Mapplethorpe in his early twenties, the two men met. Wagstaff had a history of taking an interest in the work of young male artists. Probably because he often had sexual attractions to many of these men; this ended up working in Mapplethorpe's favour, as he was looking to be 'spoiled,' and Wagstaff wanted somebody he could spoil and play the role of benefactor with.

Mapplethorpe and Wagstaff's relationship is lovingly recounted in the Crump documentary. He makes liberal use of a set of photographs that show the two men in an apartment, clowning around and obviously in good spirits. Masters of their respective universes, with Wagstaff at the height of his influence, and Mapplethorpe's star on the ascendant.

Although the romantic relationship ended, a special bond between the wealthy collector and the agent provocateur artist remained. This is what I like most about Black + White + Gray. It gives a sense of the magic that existed in Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe's creative and emotional bond with each other. The documentary is worth loving for that reason alone.

However, all was not to remain ideal. Mapplethorpe, with his well-documented unquenchable thirst for sex, eventually contracted HIV, as did many in the New York art world. Wagstaff fell ill with HIV as well, and his last day is heartbreakingly recounted in Morrisroe's Mapplethorpe: A Biography. By the time he died, Wagstaff had been sharing his apartment with a man named Jim Nelson for eleven years. Nelson, orginally from Texas, was a makeup artist who was introduced to Wagstaff by Mapplethorpe. He ended up doting on the older man, and referred to him as, "my Sammi."

From pgs. 316 to 317 of Morrisroe's biography:

"At eleven P.M. Mapplethorpe left (Wagstaff's) apartment with Ehrenkranz and Jefferson, and Nelson and the night nurse maintained the vigil. For the last eleven years Wagstaff had been Nelson's family, and while the relationship had been far from ideal, it had provided Nelson with an illusion of happiness. He lived in a Manhattan penthouse with a wealthy lover who resembled a movie star. It was everything the orphan from Texas could have hoped for, and now it was all coming to an end. Nelson did not want to let go, so he held the dying man in his arms for the next hour.

When Wagstaff died a little after midnight on January 14, 1987, Nelson was still holding on for dear life."

Nelson himself was HIV positive at the time of Wagstaff's death, and suffering from Kaposi's Sarcoma lesions, a rare type of cancer known to afflict HIV / AIDS patients. It struck me as the most tragic of all possible ends for such a brilliant human being. Wagstaff had made his mark by collecting photographs from around the world, in a way serving notice to art collectors and dealers that photography was a serious art, which wasn't a common idea when Wagstaff began acquiring his collection, which he sold before his death for some $4.5 million.

For me, the greatest moment in Crump's documentary comes from Wagstaff himself. Speaking at an art symposium, likely sometime in the late 1960s, Wagstaff tells his audience,"I have a palmist in New York who says, 'why do you think you have to tell all?' Well, you don't."

'All' can never be known about anyone, least of all someone as complicated and multi-faceted as Wagstaff. But the Crump documentary and Morrisroe book come pretty damn close.